Series

And what if we brought the foreigner back from (outside) the margins? One cannot deny that our understanding of foreignness is narrowed down to a political, if not an administrative understanding of spaces. It is this false simplicity that we shall try to contradict in this essay, by opening an exploration of the theme of foreignness. A brief discussion of certain figures of foreignness in history will set the scene, before focusing back on the foreigner proper, and her existential condition. Transcending the individual, we shall extrapolate a series of arguments by Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida to reconstruct a series of cultural motifs common to all societies, in order to discover their genesis in or around concerns of foreignness. And we shall finally go back to the basics to unveil the kind of metaphysics the foreigner may be able to invent.

The fact is surprising and saddening : philosophy, social sciences and the humanities had to wait for the late 1980s, just twenty-five years ago, for the first major study of foreignness. Julia Kristeva’s Strangers to Ourselves (1988) had to start the work from scratch : it opens the field, first, by tracing the lines of a history of the conditions and treatments of foreigners in the larger history of Europe and the West. The blame is certainly to be put on an intellectual tradition, or rather, an intellectual inclination, which did not attempt any encyclopaedic project of a cumulative history of foreigners, not to mention the philosophical ambition of an unpacking of the concept of foreignness altogether.

If existentialism evolves as a promising philosophical path for the question of foreignness specifically, it is, precisely, because numerous are the personal accounts of foreignness which invite to transcend the very possibility of conceptualisation altogether – foreignness as an event or a duration demands another language, another discourse than that of a universalising philosophy. The medium of creative, speculative and poetic hypotheses, perhaps ; or at least, the language of an interrogative subject, facing the task of philosophy just like he faces the foreign land, modest yet constructive in his attempt to elaborate upon his intuitions. Thus arrives the existentialist analysis of foreignness.

If Derrida attempted deconstruction, we should aim at organising an exercise of reconstruction. The point, here, will not be to take certain concepts and to create imbalance in one of their popular or even scholarly definitions. Rather, this exercise will be willingly oriented, with the preliminary setting of a particular horizon to reach, of a particular conceptual connection to establish. Finding foreignness within culture, ethics, language and philosophy, it is asserting that culture, ethics, language and philosophy are each bereft of a possibility without the historical and existential phenomenon of foreignness.

Just like the best philosophers, the foreigner is not satisfied with the terrain of description, be it reflective or external through what her position offers to show. The foreigner re-enters history, and becomes aware of the plasticity of the destiny of humanity. We cannot be content with the foreigner’s descriptions : we must, finally, turn to the foreigner’s prescriptions. Existentially and otherwise, the foreigner explores the first-hand evidence of the waltz of cultures, of the coming and going of epochs, values, norms and hopes. The foreigner has a sharp idea of what ‘difference’ may mean, and this concept comes to reshape her worldview altogether. At this level, speaking in methodological or practical terms could continue to help her formulating and sharing her discoveries, but another channel may be opted for, in order to reach deeper layers of historical influence. Metaphysics may be such a channel.

Behind the Enlightenment and its lumières : darkness. A small glim, but already enough to blind us. These many lights, popping from all sides — heritage of the Enlightenment and its impressive symbolics. Forever after, the metaphor is consumed and digested, and if the image behind it is made blurry by the flame, we consider that the contrast speaks for the background alone. But another process has already started. Recent historians in India have shown a path to think differently the Enlightenment, to transcend the duality of pre-modern and modern, and to reconceptualise the very hypothesis of historical periods altogether.

To do justice to the cultural heritage of any religion, one must not limit the study only to a philosophical enquiry. While philosophy may, as in this series, remain the spinal cord of a reflection on such a topic, one must also open thoughts to domains such as theology, sociology, political thought, history and gender study, among others. The present reflection is, thus, intended as an authentically interdisciplinary exploration of the two traditions, and such, around an angle, once again, which transcends the simplistic barriers of any single intellectual discipline : reason and the senses. . .

According to the phenomenologists, the world and the human being have to be investigated through the specific evaluation of human consciousness. Husserl would soon realise how, unlike in physical science, a study of consciousness must directly address the question of time. Phenomenology, from the start, would be — among other things — a discourse on time. . .

Girard does not directly address ethics in his work, but such an attempt would certainly prove highly insightful. We may discover, then, certain values that would be common to Girard and Buddhism, naturally pointing to the same conclusion: the need to forsake the romantic lie of an autonomy and independence of human beings, in favour of a deep awareness of the interdependence in human life and all worldly phenomena. This awareness is the starting point and essential precondition to a new understanding of what an ethical life is. . .

Levinas’s prose, intentionally poetic in style, carries the climate of almost an spiritual discussion. Levinas’s words have a certain aura, a sense of solemnity, the impression of a profundity that one would only find in sacred texts. Inherently, there is a sort of timeless beauty and depth visible from the first sight, in the texts of Levinas. But is it the charm of a benevolent father figure, or is it the persuasive argumentation of an authoritative patriarch ? . . .